


Adorably Amazing Archer

by CooperCooperGo



Series: Imagine ClintCoulson Prompt Fills [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: ImagineClintCoulson, M/M, Oh no truth serum, Prompt Fill, Sarcastic Jasper Sitwell, Sickfic, Stuck in a safe house, pre-phlint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 02:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10151597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CooperCooperGo/pseuds/CooperCooperGo
Summary: Clint Barton hasn’t worked with Agent Phil Coulson, Fury’s untouchable right-hand man, for long. Just long enough to wonder what exactly is under that suit.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ImagineClintCoulson prompt: I'd love a pre-plint sickfic where Clint notices that Phil is sick and has to be stealthy about taking care of hime because Phil refuses to acknowledge his illnesses. At some point during the ridiculousness that ensures Clint discovers that Phil hates the idea of "adorably amazing archers" being obligated to care for "pathetic paper pushing peons." (Phil either has a fever or is high on drugs, hence the alliteration.)
> 
> ImagineClintCoulson is accepting new prompts at [imagineclintcoulson.tumblr.com](https://imagineclintcoulson.tumblr.com/message) so feel free to drop by with a little headcanon or ask.

“He did what?!”

Clint moved the phone away from his ear. His hearing was pretty shitty, but even so Sitwell was loud as hell.

“He drank the—”

“The green stuff?!”

“Yeah, he—“

Sitwell’s voice was climbing. “Why would he do that? Why would he drink the green stuff?! Does he have a head wound?!”

“No, no, uh, I think, maybe, it’s the flu? Or…what’s the one that’s like the dinosaur? Er, brontosauritis?”

“Barton. Make. Sense.”

Clint dutifully tried to reconstruct the past twenty minutes. “Probably the flu. I mean, I don’t really know, he’s been trying to hide it the whole mission, so I got him some cold medicine at the…well, anyway, I think he thought it was NyQuil, honestly.” 

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“It is the same colour,” Clint added loyally.

The silence stretched. Clint pictured Sitwell pinching the bridge of his nose, the big lenses of his glasses riding up over his knuckles. It was an expression Clint was familiar with. In the adjoining room he could hear Coulson lecturing the potted plant about SOP for safe disposal of toxic spills in Research Lab A. 

“Uh, hello?”

“Okay…okay. It’ll be okay. Where is he now?” Sitwell’s voice had smoothed out into that manufactured calm Clint assumed they taught people in S.H.I.E.L.D. Handler School. 

“He’s here, he’s safe, he’s… uh…” The stream of dialog in the next room had turned heated. Maybe by now Coulson thought the plants were talking back. Clint stumbled onward. “So, what the hell did he drink?”

“The green stuff in the sealed container that was definitely not NyQuil?” Sitwell’s voice dripped sarcasm. “It’s truth serum, Barton.”

Clint snorted involuntarily. “Oh come on,” he said. “There’s no such thing as truth serum.”

“Oh there isn’t, is there? And how long have you been working for S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Barton?”

“Uh, eight months?”

“So there are some things about S.H.I.E.L.D. that you might not conceivably know,” Sitwell said pleasantly. “Like who the odds-on favorite is in the betting pool for when Harris finally gets canned for yelling ‘Yippee-ki-yay’ every time he jumps out of a Quinjet. Or that Hill’s B&J favaflav is Lemont.Fuji which you can only get in scoop shops in Tokyo. Or that we have truth serum. We have all sorts of stuff. Including the stuff that you say Coulson just drank which is, alright, maybe not technically truth serum, but is instead AHC-73b, a substance which induces a euphoric sense of well-being and an overwhelming compulsion to talk, while completely destroying all of a peRsON’S INHIBITIONS.”

Sitwell panted into the phone for a couple of heartbeats. Clint definitely was not using the time to try to picture what his extremely buttoned-up new handler would be like without any inhibitions. He hadn’t known the guy long, but as far as Clint could tell Agent Coulson was all about inhibitions. On the couple of missions they’d been on together he had been the model of the impartial, efficient supervisor. From the impenetrable armour of the ever-present suit to his tightly-controlled badassery in the field, Coulson was…

Clint shook himself. He was being stupid. Okay, sure, the guy was attractive. And he ticked, like, every one of Clint’s boxes. Still, he’d begun to doubt there was anything at all under that suit…

…there was something under the suit. 

Coulson lurched into the room, coming to a sloppy halt against the doorframe. If it wasn’t for his lack of coordination, glassy eyes, and the flush high on his cheeks Clint might not have known there was anything wrong with him. His black suit was immaculate as always, shirt crisp and white, his tie of some dark silky material that caught the light. He looked like he always did: contained, untouchable.

Except he wasn’t wearing any trousers. 

His shorts were dark and made of some shiny, satiny stuff that looked all microfibre and tailored—Clint supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised—some kind of fancy underwear that was maybe boxer briefs. There was a scar across the big muscle of Coulson’s right thigh, leading upwards before it disappeared under the edge of the briefs, which were kinda tight okay, leaving nothing to the imagination…

“Barton,” Coulson barked. “We need to debrief.” 

Clint jerked his eyes back up to Coulson’s face. “De… what?!”

“…ton. BARTON.” Sitwell’s voice blasted out of the phone. Clint had forgotten he was holding a phone.

“Is there an antidote?” he babbled at Sitwell. Suddenly distracted, Coulson wandered over to the nightstand by the bed, picked up Clint’s iPad and started explaining the second season of Game of Thrones to it. 

“An antidote?” Sitwell snapped. “No, there’s no antidote. Why would there be an antidote, it’s not lethal. It’s not gonna kill him. It may kill you, however.” 

“Me? What the—?“

“Barton, you are stuck in a hotel room waiting for extraction with Fury’s right-hand man who is full of AHC-73b. You are not cleared to know a fraction of what this guy knows. You have to keep him from talking—”

“How do I keep him from talking, he’s been talking non-stop since he took it!” Clint had a brainwave. “I could gag him?”

“You could… I would actually pay to see you try that…no, you just have to keep him from talking about S.H.I.E.L.D. Find something harmless for him to talk about. Tell him jokes. Give him a game to play. Keep him distracted. This stuff wears off fairly quickly. If Fury thinks Coulson’s told you all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets he will have you disappeared.”

Clint swallowed hard. “What… really?”

“No, not really. The whole disappeared thing is actually way too much trouble. There’ll just be a knock at the door one day and you’ll open it and someone will shoot you in the head.”

“Barton!” Coulson snapped. “Come over here! We need to go over the launch codes.” 

“Sitwell!” Clint squeaked.

“Look, just… keep an eye on him. I’m scrambling a retrieval team, okay? In the meantime, make him comfortable and keep him talking about anything other than S.H.I.E.L.D. Barton, you will do this. Or the next time you see me, BANG. Are we clear?” The connection cut off with a click. 

Clint put the phone down carefully and turned to his handler. Coulson had abandoned the iPad in favour of taking off his tie. He had moved on to working on his shirt but the buttons seemed to confuse him, his hands plucking at them as if he couldn’t remember how they worked, muttering under his breath all the while. He started trying to pull the shirt off, which was impossible as he was still wearing his jacket. He swayed dangerously, eyes bright with fever. 

Clint had a sudden disturbing mental image of Coulson falling over, hitting his head on the nightstand and slipping into a coma. He then had another mental image, this time of Sitwell standing on his doorstep with a Glock in his hand. Clint sprang forward to try to get a grip on the jacket. 

Coulson batted at his hands. “Barton what are you doing, it’s too hot and I need to get this off so we can talk about the nuclear—“

“Shh! Shh! If you’re gonna take off your shirt, sir, we need to get this jacket off first—”

“Don’t shush me! And I can take off my own jacket! Let go!” Coulson listed dangerously to one side, an arm caught in the tails of his shirt. Clint tried to maintain his hold on the jacket and get an arm around Coulson to keep him balanced. He tripped over one of his discarded combat boots at the same time as he got a good grip on a sleeve and yanked. 

The fabric parted dramatically at the shoulder and the sleeve came off in his hands. Coulson toppled backwards and Clint dove for him, got him around the waist and spun both of them in the direction of the bed.

Clint hit the bed with Coulson coming down on top of him with a grunt. The bed bounced a couple of times but didn’t collapse, thank god for small miracles. Clint wrapped his arms tightly around Coulson, expecting another struggle. But after a few seconds it was clear that the fight had gone out of him.

“Sir? Coulson, are you hurt?” 

“The room is spinning, I’m going to throw up,” Coulson said into his collarbone. 

“Uh, don’t do that sir, just—“ Clint wrestled the rest of the shirt and the remains of Coulson’s jacket off and tossed the pile of clothes to the floor. He was still wearing his undershirt and shorts and Clint hoped that was warm enough, because he couldn’t reach the comforter at the end of the bed without letting Coulson go and he wasn’t going to do that until he was sure the man wasn’t going to jump up and go careening off any more furniture. 

“Just rest for a second, okay? Then we’ll get up.”

“I don’t actually think I could get up.”

Clint chuckled. He wriggled them both a little more snugly against the pillows piled up at the headboard and blew out a sigh. It’d been a long day, coming at the end of a long week and he’d been up on various rooftops in the snow for a lot of it and Coulson had had the cold or whatever it was before they even got here so, yeah, it felt kinda good just to lie here for a second and catch his breath. 

Clint tried not to think about the fact that his arms were full of his—surprisingly, deliciously muscular—handler, and that he may have thought about this scenario more than once in the past few months. Though his guilty fantasies had definitely not included truth serum or the threat of Death by Sitwell. 

Coulson made a snuffly resigned sound against his chest and shifted a little, settling his weight more comfortably. “That wasn’t NyQuil I drank, was it?” he asked.

“No, but Sitwell says it’ll wear off soon, so if you can just rest maybe you can sleep it off, there’s a team on the way.”

Coulson humphed softly. “This reminds of the time Fury and I were in Zimbabwe and we had to get the premiere of the Chihambakwe regime to tell us the location of a secret former Soviet cache of nerve gas so we could destroy it before the Chinese—”

An icy shock of fear raced down Clint’s spine. Sitwell. Doorstep. Glock. 

“Boss, boss! I can’t know any of this stuff, okay? Let’s talk about something else, or, I know, let’s play a game.”

“A game…what kind of game?” Coulson’s eyes drooped closed. 

“Uh,” Clint frantically searched his memory for something childishly simple they could play that wasn’t ‘I Spy.’ The problem was, he didn’t know a lot about children’s games, they weren’t something he’d really had the chance to experience growing up. Clint closed his eyes and tried to remember that kids’ rhyming book he’d had at the orphanage. It was one of those big picture books with the heavy cardboard cover, thick pages dog-eared and creased from too-often contact with eager little hands. Clint had filled in the margins with clumsy drawings in crayon—clouds and airplanes and birds. Things that could leave. And his name on it, “C…l…i…n…t,” written in the same blocky print he still wrote his after-actions in. 

“Okay, I got it, I tell you a thing and you have to describe it in three words that all start with the same letter.”

Coulson made a small noncommittal sound.

“Uh, okay, um, ‘angry bald duck.’”

“Annoyingly agitated Anas platyrhynchos actualises Alopecia Areata.” 

Clint couldn’t help a delighted snort, a little stunned at finding yet another thing at which his handler was effortlessly competent. “Too many words!” he said.

“Okay. ‘Sitwell.’”

Clint laughed. The motion jiggled Coulson around a little on his chest.

“Your turn,” Coulson said.

“Nah, I don’t have your smarts, sir.”

“You have plenty of smarts, Barton,” Coulson said, slurring a little, his weight resting more comfortably against Clint’s chest, warm and sleepy, as the drug wore off. “But even if you didn’t you wouldn’t need them. You have your own language, your own poetry.”

“I don’t… huh?”

“The way your entire being speaks when you work with the bow. It is a language that is all harmony, all rhythm, your body in perfect alignment with your mind, at one with your will—which is why, for you, hitting your target is as inevitable as the incoming tide. Watching you when you shoot is like watching art being made or music being played. It is beautiful. You are beautiful. Like art, like poetry.” 

What. 

Coulson sighed. “Adorably amazing archer,” he finished, murmuring the words into Clint’s collarbone.

“That’s…” Clint cleared his throat. “I mean, if that’s me then what are you?”

Coulson’s shrug was diluted, a small effort against the heavy pull of sleep. “‘Pathetic paper-pushing peon,’ maybe,” he said.

If Clint weren’t so tired and so comfortable he would have been indignant. “That’s not right, sir, that’s not what you are at all.” 

Coulson’s reply was a distant vibration against the hollow of Clint’s throat. “No? What then?” 

“Uh, boink-ably bodacious badass?”

Coulson huffed out a chuckle before his breath evened out, all the tension leaving his body in a slow wave, heavy and pliable. His forehead was cradled in the bend of Clint’s neck and the solid weight of his body felt warm and good on his chest. Clint wiggled back into the mound of pillows and tightened both arms securely around his handler. Something that would have been unthinkable an hour ago now felt like something Clint had been waiting to do his whole life. He sighed deeply, felt himself drift off to join Phil in sleep. 

It was kinda perfect.

At least it was until Coulson woke up an hour later convinced that Clint was HYDRA, or maybe an octopus—that part wasn’t clear—and punched him in the gut before falling off the bed. It was less perfect then. But it was still a start.


End file.
